In 1955 the Supreme Court ruled that veterans of the U.S. armed forces
could not be court-martialed for overseas crimes that were not detected
until after they had left military service. Territorial limitations
placed such acts beyond the jurisdiction of civilian courts, and there
was no other American court in which they could be adjudicated. As a
result, a jurisdictional gap emerged that for decades exempted former
troops from prosecution for war crimes. This was not merely a
theoretical possibility, Patrick Hagopian writes. Over a dozen former
soldiers who participated in the My Lai massacre did in fact get away
with murder. Further court rulings expanded the gap to cover civilian
employees and contractors that accompanied the armed forces.

In
American Immunity, Hagopian places what he calls the superpower
exemption in the context of a long-standing tension between
international law and U.S. sovereignty. He shows that despite the U.S.
role in promulgating universal standards of international law and
forming institutions where those standards can be enforced, the United
States has repeatedly refused to submit its own citizens and troops to
the jurisdiction of international tribunals and failed to uphold
international standards of justice in its own courts.

In 2000
Congress attempted to close the jurisdictional gap with passage of the
Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act. The effectiveness of that
legislation is still in question, however, since it remains unclear how
willing civilian American juries will be to convict veterans for conduct
in foreign war zones.

Kendrick Oliver, author of My Lai in American History
and Memory, praises the book as:

An impressive, wide-ranging, multi-layered work. Patrick Hagopian uses
the problem of the jurisdictional gap to open up much larger questions
including public attitudes toward military justice and the death of
civilians, the hostility toward international law and international
legal institutions within sections of U.S. political culture, and the
defensive response of political and military hierarchies to any effort
to link individual war crimes to the principle of command
responsibility.

"An
impressive, wide-ranging, multilayered work. Patrick Hagopian uses the
problem of the jurisdictional gap to open up much larger
questions—including public attitudes toward military justice and the
death of civilians, the hostility toward international law and
international legal institutions within sections of U.S. political
culture, and the defensive response of political and military
hierarchies to any effort to link individual war crimes to the principle
of command responsibility."—Kendrick Oliver, author of My Lai in
American History and Memory - See more at:
http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/american-immunity#sthash.Upj0lCjh.dpuf

"An
impressive, wide-ranging, multilayered work. Patrick Hagopian uses the
problem of the jurisdictional gap to open up much larger
questions—including public attitudes toward military justice and the
death of civilians, the hostility toward international law and
international legal institutions within sections of U.S. political
culture, and the defensive response of political and military
hierarchies to any effort to link individual war crimes to the principle
of command responsibility."—Kendrick Oliver, author of My Lai in
American History and Memory - See more at:
http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/american-immunity#sthash.Upj0lCjh.dp

"An
impressive, wide-ranging, multilayered work. Patrick Hagopian uses the
problem of the jurisdictional gap to open up much larger
questions—including public attitudes toward military justice and the
death of civilians, the hostility toward international law and
international legal institutions within sections of U.S. political
culture, and the defensive response of political and military
hierarchies to any effort to link individual war crimes to the principle
of command responsibility."—Kendrick Oliver, author of My Lai in
American History and Memory - See more at:
http://www.umass.edu/umpress/title/american-immunity#sthash.Upj0lCjh.dpu